Personalisation systems for portable object such as smart cards are known and in particular those smart cards known as “intelligent”, that is, incorporating a microprocessor or a microcalculator. In a card personalisation system, several operations can be performed, comprising operations for relief marking of the card, printing of one or more surfaces of the cards, or electronic personalisation of the memory by means of electric contacts, magnetic tracks or devices so-called without contact such as radio or induction antenna, or control of cards for purposes of personalisation.
The document EP 1 228 481 describes a card production system for programming integrated circuit cards by means of a mechanism including several card programming stations, mobile along an axis of rotation. A rotary turret can be provided for introducing cards to the programming stations and for evacuating the fully programmed cards. This type of system can produce 3000 cards per hour. However, using a rotary, fragile and easily disruptable turret can cause reliability problems.
The patent FR 97 09643 describes an electronic personalisation cylinder with several processing locations, which takes the cards on a conveyor and processes them during its rotation. The fact of having several processing locations provides the processed cards at a greater rate than the processing time of a single location would allow.
The patent EP 0 797 167 divulges a rotating plate forming cylinder provided with a plurality of connection devices and an electronic processing card associated with each connection device. Use of this type of cylinder avoids using a fragile manipulator and easily disruptable arms for sending smart cards to be personalised to the processing locations when the personalisation stations are fixed. Each of the cards to be personalised is networked to the electronic processing card embedded in the rack of the rotating plate. This electronic card can be a part of an onboard PC. The electronic processing card is generally connected to a fixed computer of PC type paced outside the cylinder. The link between the system embedded in rotation and the installation fixed is assured by a turning collector. The connection is made by fixed contacts solid with the fixed part of the machine resting on a set of turning tracks solid with the rotating plate. The same goes for the feeds, necessary for the functioning of the equipment on board the rotating plate, made by fixed contacts supported on the feed tracks. The management software for personalisation of the cards onboard the cylinder can also manage graphic marking.
A disadvantage to cylinder installations is that the turning electronic connections do not transmit data at a high rate to the electronic processing cards. The rate is of the order of several tens of megabytes per second and thus remains much lower than 1 Gbps (gigabyte per second). There is therefore a need to boost the output of personalisation machines by transferring data more quickly to the cards to be personalised.